Uncategorized

A news item this morning on RTHK1 caught my attention. They revealed that a newspaper company in the U.S.A. had been hacked. What was curious about the item was that they didn't refer to the company by name.

The New York Times was hacked for a period of roughly 4 months, from September last year, just a few days before they published their first exposé of the wealth of Chinese Premier Wen Jia Bao's family. The Chinese government prefers to keep the wealth of its members a secret and vigorously disputed the article, going as far as to block access to The New York Times website from China. A cyber-security consultant firm hired by The New York Times investigated and monitored the hacking activity, and after comparing the patterns, methods and timing of the activity to other investigations in their database concluded that the hackers were based in Beijing.

Again, I found it curious that RTHK1 didn't mention The New York Times by name. Commercially, it doesn't make sense to omit the name. The New York Times is not a competitor to RTHK. That leaves politics. I doubt that the Hong Kong government would direct the radio station to omit the name, so I can only surmise that RTHK made an internal-monitoring "politically correct" decision to omit the name, possibly to prevent curious listeners surfing over to The New York Times and reading the whole story.

Another matter related to The New York Times' Premier Wen Jia Bao article: Does anyone else think it curious that less than 4 months after The New York Times published its Premier Wen Jia Bao article, that the Hong Kong government surreptitiously passed a law preventing the public from accurately identifying or searching corporate directors and shareholders by their full name and ID? The relationship of these two events? The reporter who investigated and wrote the article obtained all of his data from public records by tracing the directors/shareholders through multiple levels of companies. Again, whenever RTHK has discussed the new law, no one has brought up The New York Times' story. The new law allows a new kind of corruption to go unchecked, but nobody's talking about it.